Yang Ming to take slots on Evergreen’s Far East-Europe loop

Effective early June, the Taiwanese carrier Yang Ming will become a slot partner on the ‘CEM’ / ‘ANN’ Far East to Europe service, jointly operated by Yang Ming’s compatriot Evergreen and Hanjin of South Korea.

On the ‘CEM’ / ‘ANN’, Evergreen actually is the largest tonnage provider by far, deploying a homogeneous fleet of eight 9,200 teu sister vessels of its new Samsung-built L class. While Hanjin also holds an operator status on the service, the carrier only provides a single ship, the 8,588 teu HANJIN HAMBURG.

The ‘CEM’/’ANN’ loop was opened in the third quarter of 2012, when Evergreen left CSCL on the Chinese carrier’s ‘AEX1’ to launch a competing loop. Evergreen used to be a (minority) vessel provider on the ‘AEX1’ which the Taiwanese branded as ‘CEM’ – a product name that Evergreen then retained for its competing service in partnership with Hanjin.

In the present overcapacity environment, the new ‘CEM’ however never offered weekly fixed-day sailings without occasional service gaps. Since its inception, the loop always skipped one or two out of 10 sailings of each cycle. Average weekly capacity hence oscillated between 7,200 to 7,500 teu.

As previously reported, the rotation of the ‘CEM’ / ‘ANN’ is undergoing some modifications these days and the round trip duration is to be extended one week to 77 days.